Back in Black (McGinnis Investigations #1) - Rhys Ford Page 0,93
spaces marked for a single apartment, the rolling metal doors were painted the same color as the wall, obviously blending them back from notice. The doors were marked with black letters painted above the upper frame, corresponding to the parking spaces and apartment they belonged to.
“Shit, all this time we’ve been thinking they had a storage unit someplace, and it’s right here in this damn building,” I muttered to myself, walking away from the entrance and searching for the Brinkerhoffs’ spots. “Marlena should’ve known about this. Why the hell didn’t she tell O’Byrne?”
Based on how the first floor was laid out, I guessed I would find what I was looking for in the far corner of the parking structure’s lower level. My cell phone reception was spotty, and I had to go back to the ramp to get a strong enough signal to text O’Byrne about my suspicions. I got back a few words that she’d been tangled up on a call while driving but would be at the building in about half an hour. Depending on traffic, of course.
“Well, I’m just going to take a look,” I muttered as I texted back. “If she meets me down on the second level, we can start there first.”
I estimated the location of the Brinkerhoffs’ parking spaces pretty well. Set as far back into the corner as possible, it was a lot darker than the upper level, the overhead lighting flickering on and off in some bad rendition of a horror-movie setting. The lower level had a loading zone and a freight elevator, its wide doors shut and empty of a lift car. It obviously was for residents to use, because there was no way a moving truck would be able to negotiate through the parking area, and someone was obviously doing something because they’d left a white van across the marked-off space, its doors firmly shut.
It wasn’t until I came around the side that I noticed the business name on the van and the open rolling door of the storage area for the apartment next to the Brinkerhoffs’. Watson Gallery was discreetly lettered across the side of the van, but it was the storage unit that had my attention.
Even in the dim lighting, I could make out the masterful, beautiful paintings inside of the long space. Drawing closer, I was surprised to discover the air flowing out of the storage unit was cold, nearly crackling icy, and appeared to be coming out of a vent punched through the drywall between it and the Brinkerhoff unit. The canvases were up on their ends, sitting in something that looked more like a dish rack than any place to store a painting, but my expertise on the subject was thin at best. An ugly, twisted male face caught my eye, and I slowly pulled a canvas out using the edge of my shirt so as not to get my fingerprints on it. I recognized the painting I’d seen on Watson’s wall. On this one, however, there was no black rectangle with Arthur’s distinct signature. Instead there was a scrawl I couldn’t make out, and it was as tempered with age as the rest of the painting… or at least made to look that way.
“Well, shit.” I reached for my phone to take a picture of the canvas in case O’Byrne needed it for proof. “It was Watson all along.”
“Don’t be stupid. He isn’t smart enough to pull this off,” a woman said behind me. I glanced over my shoulder and recognized the petite, smiling wife Watson proudly slung his arm around in every family photo. She wasn’t smiling this time, and more importantly, she had a very large gun pointed directly at me. “You have been a hard man to kill, Mister McGinnis. So I am so happy to be the one who finally gets to do it.”
Twenty
“MARIE WATSON, I presume.” It was a hideous paraphrase, but when faced with the business end of a gun, my brain tended to glitch. She didn’t look amused, but I wasn’t exactly in a chuckling mood myself. “Let me guess. You’re the one who’s been moving Arthur’s forgeries.”
She was even smaller in person than she was on camera, which was a mean feat because I was pretty sure she’d only come up to Watson’s elbow at best. I hadn’t been stealthy coming down the ramp and around the cars, but I honestly hadn’t expected to discover a storage unit full of forgeries and a tiny Asian woman